by S. M. Reine
“That’s right,” said Nathaniel in the carefully patient voice of someone who was tired of repeating himself. “My parents are James Faulkner and Hannah Pritchard. They were going to get married, but he left before I was born. I’ve never met him.” A wrapper crinkled. She heard him swallow again. “I’m still hungry.”
Elise struggled with alien emotions, unable to tell what the twisting in her stomach might mean. Was that a feeling of betrayal? Was she jealous, or angry? Or was this a normal feeling that demons always carried around, like coals burning in their belly?
She didn’t trust herself to control those emotions around a child, and especially not that child. She took another step back, receding into the hall.
Her body wanted to melt into the darkness, uniting with the late evening gloom. It felt like she had no bones, no muscle. Her skin barely contained the vibrating energy in her core.
Anthony spoke. “Well, everything in the fridge is bad. There’s cereal—oh, no, there’s no cereal. It’s really stale. Well, do you like vegetables? They’re canned, so they should still be okay.”
“What kind of vegetables?”
“There’s green beans, and…yeah, just green beans.”
“That’s gross,” Nathaniel said.
“I’ll open it anyway. It’s all that’s left.” Drawers opened and closed. Metal rattled. “So tell me again how you got to Reno.”
“I took an airplane to Salt Lake City. And then I caught a ride on a truck heading toward Fernley.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes,” said the boy.
“What makes you think that James and your mom got taken to Hell?” Anthony asked.
“Grandma told Grandpa that James was going to visit. She was really excited, so I heard them talking about it. My mom left to get him from the airport a couple of days ago, and they never made it back to the house.”
That made Elise stop pacing. She peered into the kitchen again.
Nathaniel peeled the wrapper of another granola bar open. There were already three of them scattered across the counter top, and the empty box lay on its side. “I had felt a portal to Hell open, so I did a seeking spell and couldn’t find them. They’ve been taken. I know it.”
He popped the rest of the granola bar into his mouth.
“You felt a portal to Hell open,” Elise said.
He nodded. His cheek was pouched with food. “That’s what I’m good at—interdimensional manipulation.” Nathaniel swallowed. The slurping of saliva and responding swoosh of stomach acid was thunderous in Elise’s ears. “I’m only the second witch on record that can do it. Pretty cool, huh? It means that I can jump into Hell if I have the right tools—I did it once before, on accident. But once I get there, I’m going to need help to save my mom and James.”
His neurons were flashing, too, and his brain was full of color and light. It was all bright. Uncomplicated. Elise wouldn’t have known how to spot a lie, but he didn’t seem suspicious.
“So you came looking for me,” she said.
“Pretty much.”
“How did you even know where to find Elise?” Anthony asked. His brain wasn’t quite so uncomplicated. He had chosen to sit down between Elise and Nathaniel, just in case she tried to attack the child. She would have been offended if she hadn’t been worried about doing the same thing.
“My mom doesn’t talk about James—ever. But the rest of the coven talks.” Nathaniel’s face brightened. “He’s bound to the most powerful kopis in the world because he’s the most powerful witch in the world. He saves people. So I asked Landon—the high priest—where I could find James’s kopis, and he wouldn’t tell me. But Landon has journals. I read them.” Nathaniel touched the notebook sticking out of his pocket. “That’s also how I learned paper magic. My grandaunt, Pamela—she invented it before she died. She had a lot of journals, too. I learned a lot of things that nobody wanted to teach me.”
That was less surprising. Elise had stayed with Pamela for a few months, and the main thing she remembered about that woman was that she wrote everything down—everything . She put James’s meticulous level of organization to shame.
“How certain are you that James and your mom are in Hell?” Elise asked.
“One hundred percent.”
Elise and Anthony exchanged glances. His suspicion had been replaced by panic. Fear.
She made up her mind about what to do, even as he came to the complete opposite decision.
Anthony must have seen what she was thinking on her face, because he started shaking his head. “No, Elise. No. That’s a really, really bad idea.”
“What’s a bad idea?” Nathaniel asked.
Elise strode toward the hallway, pushing Anthony’s trepidation out of her mind.
“I’m going to Hell,” she said. “And James’s son is going to take me there.”
Before moving in with another roommate, Elise had cohabitated with James in the apartment above his dance studio for months, so she knew exactly where he liked to keep everything. His bedroom had been packed with books and smelled like a library. If Elise closed her eyes, she could still see his shoes neatly lined up on the side of his bed, could smell the incense on his altar, and could still hear the ticking of the clock over his mirror.
But nothing in James’s new bedroom was where she expected it to be. It didn’t feel like somewhere he had even visited before, much less lived. There were no books—only decorative candles on geometric shelves. The closet didn’t even have his clothes in it. The master bathroom was filled with makeup, hairbrushes, and bath oils. Everything reeked of Stephanie, James’s girlfriend.
So where did he keep all of his belongings?
Anthony caught Elise stepping out the door. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I want to confirm if James is really in Hell, so I want to try a tracking spell. Help me find a Book of Shadows.”
“No.” The word was absolute and final. Weighty silence followed.
Elise stopped in the middle of the hall and turned to face Anthony. He hadn’t taken so much as one step to follow her out of the room. “You want to go to Hell? Fine. But I’m not following you.”
Elise planted her hands on her hips. “Are you afraid?”
“You know what? Maybe I am. I’ve always been scared shitless, and I’ve gone ahead and done everything you wanted anyway, but…” Anthony shook his head. “This is dangerous, and not a normal level of dangerous. Nathaniel is just a kid, and you’re…” The rest of the sentence hung between them, unspoken.
“So you aren’t going to help me recover James,” Elise said.
“He’s in Hell. You’ve realized that, right? Have you even thought about what that means?”
“He’s not dead.”
“Hell , Elise,” Anthony said. “You’re not going into the mines to stop a demonic overlord. You’re not flying to Las Vegas to confront the Union. You’re going to the City of fucking Dis to save someone who probably isn’t even alive, as if your last attempt to kill yourself wasn’t good enough.”
She advanced on him, avoiding the shadows at the edge of the room. A fist of anger gripped her heart.
“I could easily have left you for dead when Yatai possessed you,” Elise said. “This—this thing that’s happened to me?” She swept her hand down the line of her body. “This was for you, Anthony.”
“So you think I owe you my life now?”
She circled around him. Anthony’s spine stiffened, but he continued to face the door. His hands clenched and unclenched.
“You could show some gratitude,” Elise said.
“I’ve done a lot for you. I’ve given up everything. My scholarships, my life, my—my cousin.” He hesitated. Wavered on his feet. “I think we’re even.”
She stepped up to his back and took a long smell without touching him. She remembered Anthony smelling like aftershave and toothpaste, but her nose didn’t detect any of that. Instead, she picked up the spicy odor of fear, and it made her
abs clench with hunger.
Elise stepped away. “Fine. I don’t need you anyway.”
But even as she said it, her body was disagreeing. Moving away from Anthony when he looked so delicious was like trying to escape the gravitational field of a dying star. She wasn’t strong enough.
She pressed herself to his chest.
Anthony’s breath hitched and his warm brown skin went pale. She could hear blood redirecting from his head to his hips again. Fear rapidly becoming sexual. He was responding to her proximity like Elise had always reacted to Neuma’s—with reluctant, unintended arousal.
In the two days since Elise had woken up in Anthony’s motorboat, she had been subject to a lot of bizarre instincts. Everything that she had witnessed nightmares and succubi doing for years as she’d hunted and killed them, Elise found herself mimicking, even when she wasn’t sure how she did it or why.
But this…this hunger. It was like she was waking up after being asleep for years.
She pressed her cheek against his chest and inhaled.
“What are you doing?” She heard his voice vibrating through his ribs.
Elise dug her fingers into his chest. God, his beating heart—it pulsed under her palms, sloshing blood just on the other side of the bone. All she had to do was push, and she could grip that beating muscle, twist it free of the tendons, drink its sweet juices.
Anthony made a strangled noise.
“Elise—”
The fear was delicious.
“Let me have a taste,” she whispered, burying her fingernails into his shirt.
That voice—it didn’t sound anything like her. It sounded like Yatam.
The dissonance of having the wrong voice come from her body was enough to shock Elise free of her reverie. She pushed away from Anthony. It was hard to tear her hands free without taking his heart with them.
She took three steps back, and then another three, until they were on opposite ends of the hallway. It wasn’t enough distance.
Anthony panted as he sagged against the wall. He pulled out the neck of his shirt to peer at his chest. She couldn’t see what was underneath from that distance, but she caught a flash in his mind. He had red bruises in the shape of her hands.
“That hurt,” he gasped, gripping his chest. “That fucking hurt .” He straightened, rubbing a hand over his heart. “You want to know why I’m not going with you? Because there’s a line, Elise. There’s a place where I can’t follow you. And you are so far over that line now that I can’t even see where you’ve gone.”
His pulse throbbed in her ears. Her tongue was dry and swollen. Her throat tasted like a desert.
“Get out,” she said.
“I think I should take Nathaniel back to his family.”
“No.”
“Elise, he’s just a—”
“A witch that can write and perform paper magic? The son of James Faulkner, most powerful witch in the world? The only person who knows what happened to James?”
“A child,” Anthony finished. “You remember your childhood, right? Running around in the street? Christmas with family? Homework and—and puppies and shit?”
She could see the memories he was trying to evoke dance over his brain like lightning, but it didn’t summon anything for her. That wasn’t the childhood Elise remembered.
“I was slaughtering demons when I was ten. I’d already had my falchions for years.”
He barked a laugh. “Yeah. And look at you now.”
Elise wasn’t insulted. It was hard to get angry over the truth.
She pressed a hand to her forehead, trying to contain the ache of hunger. “You can leave, but you’re not taking that child with you. Do you understand me?”
He went into the kitchen. Elise remained as still as the statue of Nügua as he exchanged brief words with Nathaniel. When the front door opened and closed, he exited alone, and the child remained in the house.
Anthony was gone.
It was easier to concentrate once Anthony was gone. Elise could stop thinking about blood, pounding hearts, and the dancing electrical currents inside of his skull. Instead, she could focus on the first of many impossible tasks: figuring out how to get inside James’s office so that she could find his Book of Shadows.
She was still inspecting his locked door when she felt a new life approach her from behind.
“Where did Anthony go?”
Elise glanced over her shoulder. Nathaniel was standing at the edge of the hallway with his arms folded and a quizzical look. “Anthony left. He’s not coming back,” she said.
“Oh.” He contemplated this fact with a tilted head, and seemed to come to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. He and Elise were of a mind on that subject. “So now what are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get into this office,” she said, running her hands over the doorway. “James has locked it down with wards.”
Nathaniel came to her side with a reverent expression.
After Elise had performed an exorcism on James in the spring, they had exchanged some of their abilities. He had acquired the strength of a kopis, and she had become capable of seeing spells. The wood of the door frame rippled in the corner of her vision, like it was underwater, but magic made the barrier as hard as stone. She couldn’t even touch the doorknob without burning her fingers. All of his magic was elegant, but the spells around the door were doubly so.
Judging by Nathaniel’s expression, it must have been pretty impressive to him, too. “Why do you need inside?” the boy asked, pushing his glasses up his nose and leaning close.
“I want to find James’s Book of Shadows so I can cast a tracking spell.”
“You can’t get in there.” The boy pointed at one of the symbols. “This means that the wards are bound to the spell crafter’s bones. And this one over here means the spell is self-healing, so it would reseal after a few minutes.”
“Move over and shut up so I can concentrate,” Elise said.
“I might be able to open it.” Nathaniel pulled out his notebook again. He glanced at her under his bangs as he flipped through the pages. “Kopides can’t cast spells.”
“You know a lot about kopides,” she said, and she didn’t bother trying to hide her irritation.
The conceited tilt to his chin was entirely James. “I know a lot about a lot of things. The Treaty of Dis says that kopides, demons, and angels can’t cast magic.”
“I’m a special case,” Elise said.
Nathaniel kept flipping through the pages. “I think you’re lying.”
She caught sight of a familiar rune and held up a hand. “Wait, go back. That was a tracking spell.”
“So?”
“So if you already have a tracking spell, then we don’t need to break into the office.”
He gazed longingly at the door. “I guess.” Nathaniel ripped the page out and offered it to Elise with an expectant look. He was testing her. Fine.
Elise took the page into the laundry room. There were two baskets of clothing—heaven forbid Stephanie let her dirty underwear mingle with James’s. She plucked a t-shirt off of the top of his pile. It smelled like James’s skin, his hair, his sweat.
Nathaniel drifted behind her. “I can cast the spell if you can’t.”
“I already told you that I can,” she said as she twisted the warding ring off of her finger, trying to keep the doubt out of her voice. She hadn’t attempted to cast any magic since her rebirth. She assumed that it was still possible—she was seeing magic like she had before. But a lot of other things had changed.
Better to find out what she could and couldn’t do before they went to Hell.
Elise hoped that she wasn’t about to make herself look like an idiot in front of a ten-year-old, and blew on the edge of the paper.
The magic unfolded.
It wasn’t like the magic Elise had previously experienced. The spells that James wrote drew off of the energy of the Earth and all its life, leaving Elise feeling drained. But wh
en she activated the paper spell that Nathaniel gave her, she felt like she was reaching her mind into an entirely new world.
Her vision darkened, and she heard a distant chime. Stars whirled through her mind—galaxies and suns and stardust and black matter. The ground was above her, and the sky below.
And then she saw something red.
Mountains. Red mountains.
Elise was suddenly drifting over a vast, dark city isolated in the center of a massive desert. Smoke plumed into the hazy air, where there was no sun, no moon, no light.
Her vision blurred again, and she saw shining towers—like no skyscraper she had ever seen before.
Another blur, and she was underground. Somewhere dark. Somewhere hot and dry.
A man was sitting in the corner of a stone cell, completely naked except for a gold band on his finger. He hugged his knees to his chest. His face was covered in gray stubble and blood, and his expression… Elise had seen that expression on the faces of a hundred demons right before she killed them. It was utter despair.
Her aspis was in Hell, in more ways than one.
Just as suddenly as she had found herself spinning through the universe, Elise’s vision cleared, and she saw Nathaniel gaping at her.
She braced herself on the washing machine and dropped the ashes of the paper spell on Stephanie’s perfectly clean tile.
“No way,” Nathaniel said.
Elise couldn’t respond. She still didn’t feel like she was back in her skin. There was nothing anchoring her to the earth and air, to her blood and bones. She felt like losing concentration for an instant would make her lose her entire body.
“You were right,” she said, voice ragged. “He’s in a prison in Dis. He must have been arrested.”
“How did you do that?” Nathaniel asked. He was astonished, like the foundations of his entire world had been shaken. But even as his mind processed the shock, she could see him analyzing it, too—adjusting his perceptions, considering the implications, analyzing the benefits.
“I told you I was special.”
“No,” he said. “Not the magic thing. I mean the part where you disappeared.”